The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Paul Liebrandt

Paul Liebrandt is operating on a different level than you, and don’t you forget it. The British chef, who trained in London and Paris under chefs like Marco Pierre White and Pierre Gagnaire before coming to New York, is so next-level that the documentary about him, A Matter of Taste, began following his career when he was just 25-years-old. Of course, at that point, he’d already been the youngest chef to receive a three-star review from the New York Times, a year earlier. He would go on to rack up stars at restaurants across the city, punctuated by abrupt departures at the height of each success. His personal website opens with a quote from Paradise Lost: “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” Do not fuck with this man.

He’s characteristically sangfroid about his career as a chef: “It’s very Americanized to have some sort of big story, like, ‘This is what led to it,'” he says. At 15, he abandoned the prospect of career in the British Army to go through a different sort of boot camp: restaurant kitchens. Why? “Things just happen sometimes.” Food was in his head; what other choice was there? He trained hard from the start, stocking up a classic French education at L’Escargot and a sink-or-swim apprenticeship under White, the archetypal hot-tempered kitchen dictator. Somewhere along the way, Liebrandt’s personal style emerged: precise, beautiful, deadly serious.

Cooking is his career; it’s also his art. He thinks in terms of ingredients, of raw materials to be processed and used to suit his needs, the way great writers use the dirty details of their own lives to feed their work, hurt feelings be damned. Anything is fodder because everything has value, is beautiful in some way. Talking about a recent trip to Hong Kong, he becomes animated, excited by the prospect of a new discovery. “We got to spend some time in a three-Michelin-starred dim sum place, and they showed us some techniques and ingredients which I hadn’t seen before,” he exclaims, detailing a new-to-him method that he’s since appropriated for his own amuse bouches.

This approach to food is why, when tasked with coming up with the 10 dishes that have shaped his career, Liebrandt made it halfway through our game before rewriting the rules, talking about ingredients rather than dishes—tools for his arsenal rather than preparations frozen in time. Prepare a photo gallery of dead plates, meals served years ago and since abandoned? He’d rather spend the time creating something new from their ashes. That’s why Corton—where he has been running the show for five years—earned two Michelin stars in its first year and has held on to them ever since. He applies his incredibly high standards to his own menu, which must keep improving. And it’s why the long-awaited opening this past weekend of his second restaurant, the Elm in Williamsburg, was the only logical next step: He’s conquered running his own kitchen. It’s time for the next lesson.

From wild blackberries at a British boarding school to the most exclusive beef in the world, take a guided tour through the foods that make Liebrandt tick.

Boarding school porridge

As a kid in England we used to have porridge at school for the wintertime—very traditional. It's one of the first things I remember; they would make it very extra-thick and we would have to eat bowls of it, with white sugar.
British boarding school was pretty bad, food-wise. And when I first went there, the kitchen team—either they were mistaken or they were playing a joke—they replaced the bowls of white sugar with salt, so we sprinkled big heaping spoonfuls of white table salt over the porridge and ate it. I couldn’t speak for their motives behind doing it, I just remember it didn’t taste very good. But you don’t really have a choice, you know? It was like, you either eat it or you go hungry.

Wild blackberries

Blackberries used to grow wild on the grounds of the boarding school. They told us not to eat them because they were poisonous, but that made us [want to] eat them. You say that to an eight-year-old kid and they’re going to go eat them, aren’t they? "Don’t do this"—they’re going to go do it. I mean, I’m still here, so I guess they weren’t poisonous.
The blackberries would grow with brambleberries, and brambleberries are like razor wire, they have brambles, thorns, on the stems. You would have to climb half into the brambles and get your arms cut to pick the blackberries, which grew at the back. It was indivisible, pain and pleasure.

Cheese and Tomato Toastie

My dad was a busy guy, and I came from a busy household—this was something he would make me when I was at living at home as a kid, when I was young. Multigrain bread with sliced plum tomatoes, salt and pepper, and slices of sharp cheddar over the top, put under the salamander and melted. It’s a very classic flavor combination, cheese and tomato, and it’s a good balance, you know, especially when it’s warm and melted. It’s very flavorsome. Cheddar is particularly good for it—Montgomery cheddar.
There’s no food background in my family and I didn’t really come from a 9-to-5 family, so boarding school was really it. When I would come home on weekends, once a month, we’d maybe go out to dinner or have a spaghetti Bolognese or something that my father would make. He did most of the cooking.

Wonton Soup

I grew up in London, opposite Chinatown, so when I would go out and venture out on my own, there were a lot of people making wonton soup. It's classical: a very good pork broth, wontons with a little pork, a little shrimp inside, poached in the broth. Sliced green onions in there, a little bit of sesame, spicy oil—Cantonese style. There was always the steamer, the person making the dumplings, and the ducks, et cetera., in the front window. My first food preparation memory was looking at [that] person in the window making wontons.
If you ever watch someone make them, they’re incredibly technical, incredibly beautiful to watch. The technique and the speed, when you’re watching someone who’s very practiced at it—it's very nimble, it’s like watching an athlete. I was in Hong Kong last year, and I saw some people there doing baby suckling pigs, preparing ducks with very interesting techniques—completely different to what I normally do. And in Japan, watching them break down whole tuna at the fish market there—things that you don’t generally do on a daily basis in my world.

Game Meats

There’s a market in London called the Berwick Street Market, not far from where I grew up, in Soho. It always struck me as bit of a juxtaposition, because Soho was the red-light district—still is—of London. They have a market that goes down the middle of it, a vegetable market, and on the side there’s a butcher. At November-time, October-time, they used to have game hanging in there—pheasants, partridge, wild hare, et cetera. It was very Dickensian; you’d have people that probably hadn’t changed much in well over 100 years selling their vegetables on a wooden cart, and you’d have all these sex shops and prostitutes and drug dealers right there.
When I thought about it later in life, I thought about how crazy that scene must sound, but…it struck me. While most young men would be looking at all the women in the window of the sex shop, I was not. I was looking at the game for whatever reason, because I found it beautiful, like marble. Meat marble, just hanging there. That was maybe when I was 15, when I’d just started cooking.

Fresh Pasta

At L’Escargot, one of the jobs that I had to do was making fresh pasta. Rolling it, making tortellinis, raviolis—it’s very cathartic to do, to take that time in the morning when you’re doing your mise en place. There’s a very beautiful ballet of rolling the pasta, filling it, forming the raviolis or tortellinis, whatever you’re doing. It’s a relaxing thing for me to do, a job that I really do enjoy. And there's that ideal of forming something out of nothing, this beautiful little something that you’ll put on people’s plates, and you’ve made the whole thing. There’s a great technique to it as well; it’s definitely something at which you need to practice. That’s a good thing, because it means that every day you do it, you can get better at it.
Every small job has its rewards, whether it be peeling a piece of asparagus or breaking down a beautiful sea bass; slicing a beautiful loin of beef, you know—everything has got its job, its technique, its beauty. Everything.

Ibérico Ham

In England, prosciutto is called Parma ham, and we never really differentiated any of the Spanish cured hams—it was just Parma ham. When I was at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, I didn’t know it at the time, but there used to be a leg of [Ibérico] hanging in one of the fridges that we would do as a salad. We used to take a little knife and slice some off and eat it for ourselves every time we walked in there. Being that it was very expensive, the chef would get crazy because the leg would disappear within a week and we’d sold, you know, three portions. He’d wonder where it all went, well, it was us eating it because it was so good.
When I went to Spain a few years after that, it was like, Oh, well now I know why. It was the bellota ham. It was in the Boqueria in Barcelona, which is stunning. I mean, the shellfish selection they had there, at that time, I’d never seen anything quite like it. It was amazing. That’s before Ibérico became internationally known—it was known, obviously, but it was definitely, back then, more in Spain than outside it. Phenomenal; it completely blew my mind.

Santa Barbara Uni

I had Santa Barbara uni when I first came to New York. We don’t get that kind of uni in Europe because it goes straight to Japan or it stays in the States—I’d heard of it, but I hadn’t had it. I was curious to try it. It's completely different to the European, what they call the oursin violet, the violet sea urchin, which are much smaller; they don’t have the same sweetness or depth of flavor. Santa Barbara uni is better raw and cold. The European is not as creamy, and it’s smaller. If you serve a raw piece of it, it’s okay, but it doesn’t really have a huge amount of flavor. It’s like apples and oranges.
It was stunning, one of those moments where you eat a product and it’s really a wow moment.

Shima Aji

I hadn’t experienced Japanese fish outside of Europe, so I came here and I had it here in New York. It's just beautiful, absolutely pristine; completely different to what I had had before, as far as Atlantic-style fish. Shima Aji has just got, for me, the perfect balance of fat and lean—the texture when it’s really, really fresh is just stunning. It’s beautiful.
When I travel around the globe, I like to see things that I can’t see here. Whether it be a local fruit or a vegetable, or a fish or something that is indigenous to the region, that’s interesting to me because it’s new. It’s an education—there are always new things to discover, especially in Asia, which is just vast, absolutely vast. You’re always discovering.

Sanda Beef

I had Sanda beef last year for the first time, in Tokyo, at the restaurant Aragawa. It is, I think, the most high level of wagyu beef you can get. You have mishima and a few others, but this one is even higher, from what I’ve been told by the Japanese. The cow itself, the way it’s handled, the breeding on it, is different to a miyazaki or something else. They take from 0.1% of the herd, they pick the best of the best, and they produce, like, three cows a year or something. You can only get it at three restaurants in Tokyo.
It was completely different to any other kind of wagyu that I’ve had—it was stunning. Beyond stunning. General wagyu beef, there’s the texture, obviously, but it doesn’t necessarily have that beefy flavor, because of the fat content. This one had the same marbling, but there was more of a balance of flavor and tenderness. It was absolutely perfectly balanced. Perfect, stunning stuff.

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